THE DISCLOSURES TRIBUNAL has found that there was a “campaign of calumny” against Maurice McCabe by former Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan, that was “actively aided” by his press officer Superintendent David Taylor.

The Tribunal was tasked with looking into allegations that there had been a smear campaign against McCabe, orchestrated by senior gardaí.

Download the Microsoft News app for your Android or iPhone device and get news & live updates on the go.

It found that Martin Callinan told Fianna Fáil TD John McGuinness that McCabe had sexually abused members of his own family.

The Tribunal is convinced that Superintendent David Taylor did more than merely inform some journalists that in the past there had been an investigation into Maurice McCabe and that the Director of Public Prosecutions had decided that there should be no prosecution and that he was consequently embittered. That is all he claims to have done. That is untrue.

He added: “While the tribunal cannot but regard it as probable that there are other journalists who have decided not to come forward and assist the public inquiry that the tribunal represents, despite having been briefed negatively by him, his attitude to his superior was likely to have been one of bluster and spoof which was eventually seen through.”

In another section, regarding an alleged interaction involving RTÉ journalist Philip Boucher Hayes and Martin Callinan, the Tribunal accuses Taylor of an “obvious deceit” in his evidence.

“It was enthusiastically taken up,” he wrote. “Furthermore, it cast a pall of pretended deceit over the entire police force. Then no one knew better. Now, they do.”

Maurice McCabe

“What has been unnerving about more than 100 days of hearings in this tribunal is that a person who stood up for better standards in our national police force, Sergeant Maurice McCabe, and who exemplified hard work in his own calling, was repulsively denigrated for being no more than a good citizen and police officer,” Charleton wrote in his conclusion.

“The question has to be asked as to why what is best, what demands hard work, is not the calling of every single person who takes on the job of service to Ireland. Worse still is the question of how it is that decent people, of whom Maurice McCabe emerges as a paradigm, are so shamefully treated when rightly they demand that we do better.”